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Goal: not achieved

Well, today’s the last day of February and I was unable to achieve my goal of having my experiment ready. And it’s not that I didn’t put in a lot of time on research this month. I’ve continued to hit my goal of four hours of productivity a day (during the week). And almost always this was done on research. I usually didn’t let myself work on the start-up until I had already hit this goal for the day.

But, there are a few of reasons I was unsuccessful:

I struggled with focus. Problems that should’ve only taken an hour tops, ended up taking double or triple that time.

I ended up agreeing to do a series of meta reviews (ugh) and the process was completely disorganized. This meant I ended up spending way too much time on this task.

Even knowing I wasn’t making progress fast enough, I took weekends off. I still think this was the right decision, but it does mean I had a lot less time to work.

I’ve been pushing pretty hard the last couple of days to try and get things finished. And I have made noticeable progress. But, there’s still a 0% chance I can finish today. There are too many small details that still need to be worked on. And on top of that, I am waiting on work from another – I can’t actually finish and completely test my work without it.

However, if I’m actually going to test my experiment in March (and this is pretty important that I do), then a couple of things have to happen. One, I need to get my experiment done within the next week, so that there’s a small period of time I can get friends to be my initial testers. Two, I actually get this work from my colleague within the next week – without it, my entire experiment fails. Eek.

I’ve got my fingers crossed, but was really hoping things weren’t going to be this tight this semester. I should’ve known it was unlikely that things would go smoothly.

I’ve heard that too. But I’m finding with my research, doubling it is not enough. It needs to be at least tripled and likely quadrupled. 😦 (Which probably says something about my estimation skills… but I think it says more about the coding environment I’m stuck using.)